In the hunt for alien life, is man truly 'the measure of all things?':
Enrico Fermi's lunchtime question at wartime Los Alamos, "Where is everybody?" has been both a gift and a problem to scientists ever since. Known as "Fermi's Paradox," it simply asks, why, since life on Earth is ubiquitous and developed very early in Earth's history, and the galaxy is very old and not overly large, aren't there intelligent, advanced extraterrestrials everywhere? In particular, why can't we detect any, and why haven't any (obvious) aliens visited us?
There have been a few dozen proposed explanations of Fermi's Paradox, in which, as is the human way, mankind is placed at the center of the picture. It's about what we see, how we evolved to this technological state, what we have or haven't heard from space.
Vojin Rakić, a Serbian philosopher, calls these anthropocentric solutions, because they put humans at the center of the picture. In a paper that studies the existing proposals for solving the paradox, he puts forth a new, possible explanation: Alien life might be unobservable to the senses humans have developed, or even live in part of the wider universe we don't know of or can' t yet detect and observe.
His epistemological approach discards the role of man in the nature of the universe and the search for life. A scholar from the Center for the Study of Bioethics at the University of Belgrade, Rakić's work has been published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
[...] Rakić begins by classifying the many proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox as exceptionality solutions, annihilation solutions and communication barrier solutions. The first posits that life is extremely unlikely to develop and we might be the only life in the Milky Way galaxy, if not the universe, and there may be nobody out there. The development of intelligent life might be even rarer, much rarer, requiring a series of crucial but exceedingly rare jumps in its path.
Annihilation solutions hold that planet-wide catastrophes happen from time to time, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, or that intelligent species cause their own extinctions with war, weapons or environmental damage, or destroy intelligent life elsewhere either as a means of protection or to grab resources.
Communication barrier solutions question whether alien civilizations are too far away, are incomprehensible to humans, or if they (or we) only exist for a relatively short period of time, or whether intelligent extraterrestrials chose to hide themselves, a scenario discussed in Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy "Remembrance of Earth's Past."
The zoo hypothesis proposes that extraterrestrials leave Earth alone to let it develop naturally, a kind of Prime Directive, as was self-imposed by human space explorers in the "Star Trek" universe.
Rakić's proposal goes further, providing an alternative resolution to the Fermi paradox that goes beyond the solution that aliens are so intelligent and advanced humanity cannot perceive them. But "that is just a fragment of the solution that is being proposed in this paper," he writes.
They don't have to take a new form to avoid human detection; they may have always existed this way. They might exist all around us, even if they don't surpass us in intelligence or have very little intelligence at all.
[...] Rakić concludes, "The formulation of the Fermi paradox is actually too narrow. The paradox is indeed why humans have not perceived extraterrestrial life in a universe that is enormous, but the question is much broader: What may exist around humans that humans cannot perceive ('around' meaning both terrestrial, extraterrestrial in our universe, as well as extraterrestrial in other universes)? That is the key question.
"The Fermi paradox is only an anthropocentric formulation of one aspect of this question."
Journal Reference:
Vojin Rakić. A non-anthropocentric solution to the Fermi paradox [open], International Journal of Astrobiology (DOI: 10.1017/S1473550424000041)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KritonK on Saturday September 07 2024, @07:01AM (9 children)
Sounds like this answer to Fermi's paradox is to ignore its assumptions, and make another, more preposterous one, namely that all intelligent life in the universe is so different from ours, that we cannot perceive or understand it. Yes, worms cannot perceive or understand us, but worms are not intelligent. Dolphins and whales may have a different kind of intelligence from ours, but they can (all too painfully) perceive us. Perhaps, if we hadn't been around, they might have eventually created their own technological civilization, wondering why there aren't other intelligent beings in the universe, given that there are two kinds of intelligent beings just on earth alone.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday September 07 2024, @08:09AM
Given the way humans behave and treat the biosphere it's entirely possible they're wondering that *with* us around.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by HeadlineEditor on Saturday September 07 2024, @10:13AM (2 children)
You make an excellent point, that I myself have often (deliberately) ignored. I've always hated Star Trek because it presented virtually every "alien" group as monocultural bipedal knobheads. I've always preferred Lem's Solaris, in which a whole century has passed since discovering a truly alien intelligence and we still can't even communicate with it, let alone understand it. But you're right: for a sufficiently vast universe, the probability of encountering a monocultural bipedal knobhead approaches 1.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2024, @11:30AM (1 child)
Which they explained in both TOS (in passing) and DS9 (I think, I'm not a trekkie/trekker) with the god-inna-box explanation that a primeval bunch of hyperadvanced monocultural bipedal knobheads went around seeding the habitable planets in the galaxy with yet more of the same, knowing that, in the fullness of time, at least one of these seeded races would develop TV, and crappy SF soap operas with even crappier SFX and costume budgets...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stormreaver on Saturday September 07 2024, @05:46PM
The practical answer is, "time and budget constraints." They were all variations on the human form because that's all they could afford at the time. The books sometimes introduced lifeforms that were impossible to represent on-screen, but their budgets were far less restricting.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 08 2024, @05:53PM (4 children)
We probably will never find intelligent life, because if it's out there and aware of us, they know that we eat intelligent creatures; whales, the incredibly intelligent octopus that can easily figure out how to open a jar, dolphins...
Our first contact with alien creatures will likely be a cookout. Aliens had better hope they taste bad to us.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday September 09 2024, @05:22AM (3 children)
Of course, it could be the other way round [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday September 10 2024, @01:23PM (2 children)
They made a Twilight Zone episode from that story as well. We have been proven to eat intelligent creatures, even from our own species. Space aliens have not only never been proven to be carnivores, they haven't even been proven to exist!
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Wednesday September 11 2024, @05:28AM (1 child)
If intelligent space aliens do exist, I would be surprised if they aren't carnivores. As Larry Niven put it, how much intelligence do you need to stalk a cabbage?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday September 11 2024, @01:20PM
Far less than the intelligence needed to avoid being eaten.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 3, Funny) by Ingar on Saturday September 07 2024, @08:09AM
Dark Matter Microbes
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday September 07 2024, @01:30PM (12 children)
FTL is impossible, and rapid travel even at a reasonable fraction of c is excessively dangerous. (Collisions are essentially impossible to avoid.)
Also, by the time a line of descent has been living in space a few centuries, it's adapted, and no longer finds planets suitable/tolerable/desirable.
If travel speed is limited to, say, 0.1c then it takes long enough to transit between suitable planets that by the time you get there, you no longer find planets a suitable choice.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Saturday September 07 2024, @07:44PM (3 children)
A gravitational slingshot around the local star and a reasonably decent propulsion system to get up to speed and even at 0.1c you're going to be in another star system within a century or two depending on how far you go, after which data can come back a lightspeed. We're launching Starlink sats at a rate of knots, a suitably advanced civilization might be able to launch interstellar probes at a similar rate, especially if they've been able to utilise asteroid mining and automate the assembly and launch process. From there it's perhaps not such a huge to leap launching von Neumann probes, which would make their rate of exploration and charting other star systems exponential.
Also, while it might be possible that there are species so alien that we're looking straight at them and not realising, or even seeing, them, is it really feasible that applies to *all* of them? That's just as anthropocentric a view, albeit inverted, as the one they are claiming is flawed, and therefore probably just as unlikely, and that also applies to all the other "they're out there, but..." theories - Prime Directives, Dark Forests, Galactic Zoos, etc. - there have to be zero rule-breakers. Exoplanets seem plentiful, the building blocks of life seem plentiful, so I think we're back to the position that either sentient life is incredibly rare, the great filter(s) (I don't feel there needs to be just one) are very, very effective at preventing alien civilizations reaching out to each other. Or maybe, while it's also an incredibly anthropocentric view, maybe it really is as simple as we're the first to get this far, at least within our observation bubble and timeframe, because *someone* has to be.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 08 2024, @06:02PM
I'd say 300 three story ion engines powered by two equally huge fusion electric generators should give you 1G of acceleration for as long as you need it.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 08 2024, @06:15PM (1 child)
Exoplanets seem plentiful, the building blocks of life seem plentiful
Yet like the toddlers we are, we don't know how to turn those blocks into anything useful, in this case life. We don't yet have any real theories of how life started, only hypotheses. The Drake equation is fatally flawed because we don't know half of what needs to be counted or measured, or what those measurements are, except the approximate number of planets with water that are in their star's habitable zone.
After all, Earth and Venus are twins, yet Earth is alive and Venus is dead.
If we find no proof of life on ancient Mars or Europa we can probably guess it's rare, or we're the first. If we find microbes in Europa's ocean we should assume life is common.
It's possible that it took ten billion years for the universe to be in a position to produce life. We know it took another four billion for that life to become sentient.
We're missing almost all of the needed data to answer the question.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday September 08 2024, @08:35PM
For me the biggest issue with it is simply time and the vastness of space, something the equation doesn't really capture. We've only been a detectable civilization by means known to us for at most two centuries or so (e.g. detection of pollution in our atmosphere from the industrial revolution), meaning we're effectively invisible to any civilization located beyond a radius of 200ly. Similarly, a civilization that sent a transmission or provided some other evidence of their existence towards us would have had to have done so approximately as many years ago as they are light years distance, less how long we've had the ability to detect that evidence *and* happened to be be looking in the right direction. Drake's final variable, "L", kind of touches on this, but doesn't include the distance or range of observation. If there was a civilization that was actively sending out "Hello Galaxy" messages 3000-2000 years ago, but was 1750ly away, they would have missed us being able to receive their message by ~250 years and, unless at some point in the distant future we happen on the ruins of their home world, we'll never know they ever existed.
Take that into account, and the Milky Way could potentially have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of suitable civilizations at any one time, but unless the bubble in time and space when one is detectable happens of overlap the time and location when another is listening, they'd never know about each other. Or maybe not thousands - I suspect the double birthday paradox would make the chances of two bubbles intersecting reduce dramatically as the number of bubbles increased, in which case, we're right back to the Fermi Paradox.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 08 2024, @03:44PM (3 children)
Planets change over the course of millions or billions of years. There's plenty of time even if you're traveling at 0.001C which is a speed attainable with present human technology.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 09 2024, @05:39PM (2 children)
You've missed the point. After you live in an environment a few centuries, you either adapt to that environment, or you die. And a few millennia would be closer to the average transit time. So you won't WANT to visit a planet, except for possibly very quick exploratory stops, that would probably be handled by robots anyway.
There are lots of additional reasons, such as typical planets not supporting your form of life. If they even have the same protein molecules in their lifeform, expect instant hyper-allergic reactions. (We can't catch their diseases, but we also can't live in the same atmosphere with them.) Etc.
I think finding alien life would be quite interesting. We could check out the structure of the ribosome and start having reasonable arguments about panspermia...either that or just discard it. But I expect people to be living either on Earth, in artificial environments, or both.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 09 2024, @06:09PM
Unless, of course, you do. There are advantages to ground - such as it being a very different experience than sky and the weird stuff that happens on ground such as life, geology, etc.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 12 2024, @04:48PM
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 08 2024, @06:00PM (3 children)
I see you haven't read my latest novel. It's been out a year. An acknowledgement is made to Albert Einstein, "without whom this book would not have been possible. Or necessary."
If you travel to almost anywhere, double the number of light years there to find out how long to get there in ship's time at a constant 1G acceleration. You can get to Sirius in ten years, but a hundred years will have passed here in the solar system, thanks to Einstein's time warp.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 09 2024, @05:29PM (2 children)
Did you miss the part about "if you're going to fast, you can't dodge oncoming micrometeorites...and mv^2"? At high speeds micrometeorites would be deadly, and while they're uncommon, you're sweeping out a huge volume of space.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday September 10 2024, @01:20PM (1 child)
At that relative speed, micrometeorites would behave as cosmic rays, able to be repelled by electromagnetism.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 12 2024, @04:49PM
They would need to be sufficiently charged first.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by stormreaver on Saturday September 07 2024, @05:43PM
The premise of the article is a rehash of a billion water cooler conversations, and offers no new insights.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 07 2024, @06:16PM (1 child)
I think we've underrated intelligence. A case in point is all the recent hoopla over AI. It amounts to wishful thinking that general intelligence will just magically happen very quickly if only we build the necessary hardware: neural nets. And sprinkle in some LLM magic. I suspect we're missing a few things, perhaps quite a few necessary ingredients. This same wishful thinking mistake was made decades ago with respect to chess. Hoped that computers being able to play chess well would just sort of automatically lead to general AI. Instead, chess machinery is the ultimate in idiot savantry. Awesomely good at chess, utterly incognizant of anything else, including any larger meaning of chess, lacking emotions of despair and boredom so that they are perfectly "willing" (they have no will) to grind on playing even in hopeless or otherwise clearly decided situations. Another case in point is much SF such as The Terminator and The Matrix, in which machines have somehow become intelligent enough to enter the competition of life, but not quite smart enough to win against us.
It's been only a century or two that we've learned enough about the universe to conceive of this quest to find intelligent aliens, and even less time that we've been able to make only the barest beginnings of a thorough search. At this point, we can't even rule out other life under our very noses in the same solar system we're in, and are conceiving of various missions to check out some of the possibilities.
Against that time frame of 2 centuries, set the fact that it took a bit more than half a billion years for life to advance from microbial to intelligence, and before that, Earthly life existed as only microbial for over 3 billion years. Today, we breezily suppose that it took so very long because it was an incremental process, but now that we exist, we can greatly accelerate things. Yes, we probably can, but I guess we've still overestimated how fast we can get there and underestimated and overlooked the difficulties.
My guess is that microbial life will turn out to be relatively common. Just making a wild guess that 0.1% of star systems will have planets that support microbial life. Intelligent life will of course be much, much rarer.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 08 2024, @06:25PM
A case in point is all the recent hoopla over AI.
Recent? They've been calling computers "electronic brains" since at least 1952 when most Americans learned of them in the 1952 election. Polls and experts said that the election that year would be a close race between Eisenhower and whomever ran against him, and that Eisenhower would lose, but a computer said Eisenhower would win in a landslide.
Walter Cronkite didn't believe it. He should have. And that computer was less powerful a computer than a Hallmark greeting card is!
Artificial intelligence is magic. Not Gandalf magic, David Copperfield magic. It's just lots of memory and storage and giant, cleverly programmed databases. A computer knows no more than a printed Encyclopaedia Britannica knows.
Pay no attention to the man behind the window, Dorothy!
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2024, @03:52PM (2 children)
On a couple of YouTube channels I've seen more possible good conjectures for answers to the Fermi Paradox than I can even remember.
One recent hypothesis, and an interesting one now that AI is all the rage:
Eventually an intelligent civilization develops AI.
Eventually either benevolently or malevolently the AI takes over.
Eventually the biological boot loaders become extinct.
All that is left out there in the universe are planets (like VGER) populated by AI.
Maybe: the AIs all talk to one another across the vast distances in ways that we are unable to comprehend or possibly even detect. Just as a dog can't comprehend many of our thoughts and develop a space program.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday September 10 2024, @11:51AM
So-called "AI" endlessly copying and pasting internet from early 21st century earth into more and more bizarre pastiches of itself.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 12 2024, @04:53PM